A TumBelivr event in San Fran!

Tumblr and the Believer are throwing a party at San Fransisco’s Make-Out Room! Sheila Heti will be there, and so will Issac Fitzgerald, and Melissa Graeber. If you’d like to cover this event for #LitBeat, well, just get in touch!

Our friends at The Believer teamed up with Los Angeles radio station KCRW to launch a monthly podcast. Check out the first episode of The Organist to hear from George Saunders, Nick Offerman, Greil Marcus and more.

Some of the best novels out there — Huckleberry Finn, Of Mice and Men — deal largely with fictional friendships. Yet depictions of close friends that are central to the plot are considerably rare in modern novels. At The Guardian, AD Millernotes this isn’t the case for movies and TV shows, and suggests a number of reasons why. You could also read our own Kevin Hartnett on friendship in the age of Facebook.

Mozambican author Mia Coutohas won the 2014 Neustadt Prize. The prize, which awards the recipient $50,000 and is sponsored by the University of Oklahoma, recognizes exceptional fiction writers, poets and playwrights from around the world. Pair with Philip Graham’s Millionsessay on Couto.

Jeff Sharlet had a challenge for his creative nonfiction students at Dartmouth College. Sensing that journalism had become too “dull,” too mired in a “culture of professionalism” divided “between reporting and ‘storytelling,’” Sharlet asked his students who didn’t “know [any] better” to create a magazine of their own. The result, 40 Towns, embraces “the right conditions” of literary creation – immersion, journalism, regionalism and “a term of revision” – to present a “collection of documents, artifacts of real life” about the Upper Valley.